I guess I might as well admit it: one of the reasons I fled to New York for college after spending nearly 18 years in North Carolina was to get away from so much blasted country music. I mean, it's everywhere down there. It plays while you're shopping at Goodwill, eating at a diner, pumping gas. My only haven was inside my own car, where I could control what played through the speakers.
Maybe because I grew up on it and thus had heard it all by age twelve or maybe because a lot of today's popular country music is nothing like what I knew, I spent a large portion of my teenage years hating country music — hating the over-enunciated Southern drawls, cliché fantasy scenarios, plucky guitar riffs. I couldn't wait to get away from it all.
But then I actually got away from it. And I don't know if it was more "you don't know what you've got till it's gone" or more "you can take the girl out of the South but you can't take the South out of the girl," but I didn't like the absence of country music as much as I had expected I would. In fact, I developed an acute longing for it, an emptiness without it, a very short time after moving to this place where it as a genre is, comparatively, so nonexistent.
I mentioned this to my Long Island-native roommate one night and realized something: that "country music" isn't just a genre to people who grow up where the before-mentioned clichés are true. It's a lifestyle. It was my lifestyle for eighteen years, I just didn't notice it.
Of course, my roommate is familiar with country music; even if you don't have to endure it over the Walmart loudspeaker 24/7, if you live in America, you're bound to be exposed to it at one point or another. But she had no idea that the dirt roads, trucks, beer, blue jeans, and river banks are actually things Southerners encounter basically every day. In talking with her, I realized that what I was truly missing was not country music as a genre, but as a way of life.
I spent summer days by the river bank, listening to frogs croak and mud squish between my toes. My Sunday school teacher saved me a baggie full of deer jerky every time he made a batch. I dated a boy (not for very long) who drove a truck with a lift kit. I myself drove a truck (thankfully sans lift kit), that beloved sanctuary where I could play whatever tunes I felt like—so even when I was listening to synthpop, I couldn't escape country music.
When I moved to New York, the sudden absence of all these elements at once brought me back to the only accessible piece of this lifestyle: the music. It's easy to search "country" on Spotify and put the first playlist on shuffle; it's less easy to drive a Dodge Dakota around Brooklyn. So I began listening to country music again, and when I started to build a playlist of my own, I noticed a severe distinction between the music I remembered my mom playing when I was still young enough to sleep in her bed and the mainstream tunes I had heard in more recent years. I found myself with a playlist divided: half-full of country music, half-full of bro-country music.
Suddenly, my teenage disdain for the genre made sense. "Bro-country music" (the most hilarious and accurate title I have ever heard), which first started to gain popularity in the early 2010s, had warped my opinion of country music because I didn't realize that the two are separate genres. Bro-country is the country music of Tumblr hate-posts and Facebook rants. Think: Jason Alden trying really, really hard to rap believably in "Dirt Road Anthem." Think: the endless sexualization of women in bikini tops and trucks, or the even more popular women in bikini tops on trucks.
The problem here is that bro-country music (i.e. Luke Bryan, Florida Georgia Line, Thomas Rhett) thinks it's the same thing as country music (i.e. George Strait, Toby Keith, Brooks & Dunn), so it adopts all of the classic, real-life Southern imagery that feels, to people like me, so much like home.
But bro-country music takes these images, these anecdotes, these all-too-real feelings, and exploits them for the purposes of confirming its own masculinity. Bro-country music, no matter how desperately it tries to hide behind the timeless tropes of traditional country, isn't really about the lifestyle. Sure, all the themes are there, but none of the sentiment.
To show you this distinction, let's take a common trope in both genres: women. Bro-country music uses women to describe men, like in the chorus of Luke Bryan's song, "Drunk on You":
Girl, you make my speakers go boom-boom
Dancin' on the tailgate in a full moon
That kinda thing makes a man go mmm-hmmm
You're lookin' so good in what's left of those blue jeans
Drip of honey on the money maker gotta be
The best buzz I'm ever gonna find
Hey, I'm a little drunk on you
And high on summertime
"Drunk on You" isn't giving its star girl any kind of validation other than the validation she gives the star man. This sentiment is in direct contrast to that of traditional country music, like the chorus of Lonestar's song, "Unusually Unusual":
She's unusually unusual
Absolutely unpredictable
She's so different
And that's what's wonderful, yeah
She's unusually unusual
And that's beautiful to me
Do you see the difference? Throughout the whole of "Unusually Unusual," Lonestar slips into the first person narrator only a handful of times, because the song isn't about him, it's about the girl. (And let's be honest, ladies, I think we'd all rather be told that we're endearingly unique than that we make a guy's "speakers go boom-boom"—am I right?)
A lot of people seem to think that the phenomenon of bro-country music is dead or dying out, but in a lot of ways, the damage has already been done. Even if people can accept that country music from the mid-to-early 2000s and before can be taken seriously, the stigma of bro-country music has defined almost the entirety of country's modern releases.
Some artists still cling to the classic roots of country music. Darius Rucker's "Southern Style" and "Alright" are two modern highlights that harken back the days when Alan Jackson and Travis Tritt defined the genre. Eric Church, despite his guilt over believing "bro-country started with him," continues to break the stereotype, from 2011's nostalgia-packed "Springsteen" to last year's ballad-for-the-boys "Mr. Misunderstood." And we can't forget all the lovely ladies celebrating traditional country music, then and now: Deana Carter and the Dixie Chicks, Jana Kramer and the Band Perry.
I hope you know what you're hating when you say you hate country music. Because I didn't, for many years. I wish someone had made it clear to me that celebrating a way of life is not bad, not at all. Exploiting that way of life to further your own means, however, is. And this is where the distinction between bro-country and traditional country lies.
When bro-country finally dies out for certain and singers like Jake Owen either fade into oblivion or start paying due respect to both my gender and my home region, maybe the music I hear every time I do the grocery shopping back home won't be so bad. In the meantime, all the country music I hear up in New York, I get to choose. And I choose country—not bro-country—every single time.
